Seeing A Bigger Picture, What you have been deconstructing at Wikipedia Review... Options

[Somey]

What a bunch of smarmy, sleazy crap. I just hated it when managements would pull that kind of shit on me. It wasn't just dishonest, it was insulting. They actually thought we wouldn't see it.

So what do you do exactly, Mr. Pwok? Are you a broker, pension-fund administrator, accountant, auditor, or what? I knew we had active stock traders and such on the board, but you seem to be considerably more advanced in the profession than the others, at least the ones I know of...

If I were emporer, the AOL people and their auditors would be in jail, and guys like you would be looking over their shoulders very nervously when contemplating any sort of snake dance with their numbers.

Could we put the AOL people in jail anyway?

Sheesh, how stupid do you think I am? Your game is sooooooooooo Utah. What are you thinking now, that the best defense is a good offense? Look, I don't trust Wikipedia farther than I can throw it, but my beef with them is completely unrelated to your crusade, that's for sure.

I wasn't aware that Utah had such a reputation... can you come up with any sources to back that up? Either way, you've got to calm down. Mr. Byrne here is an employer, and my assumption has always been that it's as an employer that he's on this "crusade" against naked short selling. Or are we saying that the jobs of hundreds of workers are of no consequence?

You know who I really feel for? The sucker of a fund manager who bought a big slug of your stock and has to sit there at 2 in the morning and worry about it.

There's medication for that now, you know!

[Patrick Byrne]

Somey,

Cool, man. What a welcome change it is to be on a site where the foolishness has not yet reached critical mass, and everyone can see the deal.

Patrick

[Patrick Byrne]

Welcome, Mr. Byrne -

I agree with you that "naked" short selling is a violation in the trust we place in the public equity markets, and I agree with you that Wikipedia has harbored at least a couple of people who have been astroturfing for the legitimacy of this illegtimate -- if not illegal -- practice. The more that can be done to expose them, the better.... That having been said, I beg to differ with your initial characterization, that what Wikipedia Review critiques (however effectively), is "part of a larger puzzle".... For the record, I have both been an Overstock customer (satisfied) and also shorted its stock (to substantial profit). I do not harbor ill-will toward the company, but do believe that in general the equity markets -- including legitimate short-selling -- work well at valuing companies, though abuses such as naked shorting should be stopped. But however much you feel that what has happened to your company is the problem with Wikipedia, I assure you, the arena for potential damage is our entire society, not just Overstock.com.

In any case, welcome.

Dear Gomi,
I thank you for your kind words and the thought that went into them. You make three three points that I will adress each in turn.

1) "The more that can be done to expose them, the better.... " OK, I'm cool with that.

2) "But however much you feel that what has happened to your company is the problem... I assure you, the arena for potential damage is our entire society, not just Overstock.com." Here, I respectfully suggest that some small degree, perhaps, you have accepted as true a claim whose only recommendation is that it has been parroted relentlessly by a compliant and obedient financial press. More than anyone, I get that this is not just about Overstock.com. I have said, over and over again. I think there is a crazy, deep, horrendous financial crime occuring against the American people, one that dwarfs any in living memory. The game is rigged so badly that our country may as well be riding down the highway with the foot-brake pushed. As I was quoted as saying in Fortune, "Somewhere in America there are grandmothers eating dogfood for dinner tonight so some assholes on Wall Street can drive Porches." The Overstock story is just a footnote to a financial crime of incalculable dimension. I get it. Part of their Chewbacca Defense cover-up is just to pretend that this is the Overstock CEO (me) talking about Overstock, when in reality it is just some guy (also me) trying to explain how America has been ripped off by Wall Street for tens of billions of dollars, if not more, while thousands of entrepreneurs have been destroyed.

3) Is the bigger issue the corruption of Wikipedia? You are quite possibly right here. Myself, I think the issues go hand in glove. I now think that there have been dynamics at work in our society for years, and as they migrated online it became possible to recognize, document and expose them. Yes, in the long run the corruption of our discourse may be the bigger issue, I grant you. But in that bout the corruption of Wikipedia may prove to have been just one round.

Respect,
Patrick

[Somey]

There's a deal?

I do try to keep an open mind, at least. Having said that, I have to agree with Gomi somewhat - for many of us, including myself, this whole thing is really about Martin Luther, not naked short selling. Nobody has really proven a distinct relationship between SlimVirgin and Gary Weiss, other than that Mantanmoreland/Weiss helped SV edit Nazi references into the Luther article. You wouldn't think that would be enough to lead her to defend him to such an extent, but I guess that's where you come in.

Either way, the naked shorting seems like just one aspect of the picture, not the Big Picture itself... (I'm not saying I can't be persuaded, though!)

And Pwok seemed like just a regular guy, until today, anyway. In fact, he's been practically exemplary.

And what's a guy going by the name "Unrepentant Vandal" doing in the stock-trading game? Somehow I just can't see a guy in an Armani suit sitting down and deliberately posting misinformation to WP, not to mention going on a blanking spree. The world just gets weirder by the minute.

Oh, and by all means, tell the Juddster that Pwok's IP has never changed, it's not a proxy, and it doesn't match any of the Weiss ranges or addresses we've encountered here. He may well have a special enmity for Utah-based CEO's, but Gary Weiss he's not!

[Kato]

As I was quoted as saying in Fortune, "Somewhere in America there are grandmothers eating dogfood for dinner tonight so some assholes on Wall Street can drive Porches."

Ah. Thomas Jefferson, 1789. Well remembered Patrick.

[tarantino]

Oh, and by all means, tell the Juddster that Pwok's IP has never changed, it's not a proxy, and it doesn't match any of the Weiss ranges or addresses we've encountered here. He may well have a special enmity for Utah-based CEO's, but Gary Weiss he's not!

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

[Somey]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

I myself am disturbed by it, but which is the dissident voice?

Besides, I'm not trying to suggest who he is, only who he isn't. He could still be one of the 6 billion other people in the world, y'know!

[Pwok]

If someone is short-selling shares that haven't been borrowed, then I agree with CEO Byrne that there's a legitimate complaint. It's a fraud on the market, and like other frauds it ought to be pursued and the perpetrators punished. That said, I'm skeptical that this is a system-threatening problem. I think there are far more important problems out there than this one. And, once more, if Overstock wasn't doing so badly, attacks by short sellers wouldn't particularly matter.

As for your company's financial performance, it would take me quite a bit of time to analyze Overstock and its industry. That said, most of your positive OCF in Q2 came from increased current liabilities. In other words, you stretched out your payments. Oh, and you sold off a bunch of inventory without replacing it: probably the stuff you'd written down in previous quarters so you could make your gross margins look good in Q2. But your revenues were down significantly from the same period a year earlier; it would seem that customers aren't exactly flocking to Overstock.com, now are they?

I don't know what the difference is between the base business and your "fulfillment partner," and I'm not sure I want to because something tells me it's where a lot of sins are hiding. Please don't tell me that there's a red stripe painted in a common warehouse and that everything on one side of the line is theirs and everything on the other side is yours. The possibilities are endless. We'll let the SEC's folks handle that one. Should make for good reading.

So what do you do exactly, Mr. Pwok? Are you a broker, pension-fund administrator, accountant, auditor, or what? I knew we had active stock traders and such on the board, but you seem to be considerably more advanced in the profession than the others, at least the ones I know of...

I'm retired. I did a bunch of things. Enough to know that American business on parade would look like the cast of the movie Freaks. In my first financial position, on the first day, the first thing I heard from the most experienced people was: "Never believe corporate management. They always lie." I remember being taken aback by the cynicism. Five years later, I was singing the same tune. You could still make money on the stocks, as long as you didn't believe what you were told. I listened to conference calls for comic relief.

Could we put the AOL people in jail anyway?

Depends on what you mean by "we."

I wasn't aware that Utah had such a reputation... can you come up with any sources to back that up?

I'm not asking you to believe it. If you want to do business with Utah-based companies, be my guest. It'll be your funeral. Let's just hope the U.S. doesn't stick that Utah export to Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, in the White House. If you think Bush has been a disaster, by the time Romney and his cronies get through with us, there'll be nothing left.

Either way, you've got to calm down.

No, I don't.

Mr. Byrne here is an employer, and my assumption has always been that it's as an employer that he's on this "crusade" against naked short selling. Or are we saying that the jobs of hundreds of workers are of no consequence?

CEO Byrne is pissed about his stock and his stock options, and because he's pissed then by God it's the biggest issue in the whole world because he's a CEO and he says so. And he probably got leaned on by his board of directors, too. And if Overstock is like a lot of other companies, the stock getting clobbered probably screwed up his strategy of underpaying employees in cash and instead giving them shares. He might have been facing up against the issue of having to pay a living wage in dead presidents. O! The horror!

But not a single job at his company (except maybe his own) is at risk from naked short selling. Again, short selling has never been my game, but if I had a buck for every CEO who blames his failures on short sellers, I'd be even better off than I am now. Folks, it's the oldest excuse in the book. If other, more naive people on this board want to swallow that one, go right ahead, but I'm telling you that when I was in the finance game we laughed at CEOs when they went on a tear against the shorts. Study after study will tell you that the shorts usually get it right.

Seriously, I'm here to tell you it's a steamin' crock o'shit. CEO Bryne is painfully typical of the CEO breed: it's always, always, always someone else's fault. Always. Look, I know that it sounds like I've got an ax to grind against his company and/or the stock. I don't. I couldn't care less about either one. Never thought much about them before today, except to notice the hot women in the ads telling us that it's all about the "O." I've always wanted to say, "Sweetheart, you got that one right." CEO Byrne, you picked a good ad agency. Soft-core through and through, but who can possibly object?

Anyway my issue is with smarmy, maniuplative corporate executives. Caveat emptor! Now, would anyone like to know what I really think?

This post has been edited by Pwok: Sun 2nd September 2007, 6:45am

[Somey]

I'm retired. I did a bunch of things. Enough to know that American business on parade would look like the cast of the movie Freaks. In my first financial position, on the first day, the first thing I heard from the most experienced people was: "Never believe corporate management. They always lie." I remember being taken aback by the cynicism. Five years later, I was singing the same tune....

Yikes. You're quite sure you're not Lir, then?

Not that that would be a bad thing, mind you! Though I guess you wouldn't necessarily even know who Lir is, come to think of it...

Anyway, like it or not, Patrick Byrne is an important figure in this site's history - such as it is - and that counts for something even if he is a corporate executive. I'm certainly not saying you have to like him or anything like that, but please, try to sound a bit less accusatory.... If you can just manage that, everything should be all peachy-keeno...!

Pretty please, with sugar on top?

[Unrepentant Vandal]

I agree with you that "naked" short selling is a violation in the trust we place in the public equity markets, and I agree with you that Wikipedia has harbored at least a couple of people who have been astroturfing for the legitimacy of this illegtimate -- if not illegal -- practice. The more that can be done to expose them, the better.

It isn't practical to ensure that it is possible to borrow what is being sold, one just has to assume that it is. Inevitably this leads to occasional naked shorting.

That can be differentiated from deliberate naked short selling with no intention to settle - but there is little evidence of this happening, very little reason to do it, and where it is I suspect it's the fault of some quant strategy rather than a result of a grand conspiracy to keep company share prices down for kicks.

And what's a guy going by the name "Unrepentant Vandal" doing in the stock-trading game? Somehow I just can't see a guy in an Armani suit sitting down and deliberately posting misinformation to WP, not to mention going on a blanking spree. The world just gets weirder by the minute.

Don't worry, no Armani suits here!

Anyway, I don't trade stocks, but interest rate futures.

"Somewhere in America there are grandmothers eating dogfood for dinner tonight so some assholes on Wall Street can drive Porches."

My conscience is clear. All pet food sold in the UK has to be fit for human consumption

[Patrick Byrne]

"CEO Byrne is pissed about his stock and his stock options, and because he's pissed then by God it's the biggest issue in the whole world because he's a CEO and he says so. "

Actually, you are the one who is in the "because I say so" mode. As I wrote earlier, by age 15 most of us outgrow the habit of arguing by impugning the motives of the others. You have made this claim repeatedly, along with other claims regarding blame shifting, without adducing evidence for them, which is right and appropriate because they is false. You are, however, reading from the Party Line playbook magnificently, though.

I came here a year ago and posted information about Slim Virgin. Was that all driven by me being about "stock and stock options" too?

Let me make it simple. Here are two articles from Bloomberg Magazine. They describe two pernicious effects of naked short selling, one on entrepreneurs, one on shareholder democracy.

Feb 27, 2006 - Stock manipulation that turns proxy voting into a corporate hoax
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=new...id=a4OuCsU8r2Yg

Sep 2006 - How traders drive share prices down using borrowed and/or phony shares
http://cdn.overstock.com/06-09BloomMarket_NSS.pdf

Do you have any reply concerning the issues raised in these articles? Or are you just going to flog the "Patrick is just pissed, the reason he posted these is because he is pissed, these issues don't matter because Patrick is pissed" line of "reasoning"?

Patrick
PS No more "Mr. Byrne" please. There has never been a "Mr." on the Byrne side that I know of.

As I was quoted as saying in Fortune, "Somewhere in America there are grandmothers eating dogfood for dinner tonight so some assholes on Wall Street can drive Porches."

Ah. Thomas Jefferson, 1789. Well remembered Patrick.

Thanks, Kato.

[Kato]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

[Unrepentant Vandal]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

Somey seems pretty even handed with checkuser so far as I can tell. Anyway, checkusering is an essential tool for an administrator of a website - please don't fall into the trap of thinking that Wikipedia has a good model!

[Daniel Brandt]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

Yes, I find it disturbing that he doesn't do it a lot more often. If I was running this board, all admins would be using their real names instead of screen names, and every single post, from admins and lesser mortals alike, would have the IP address from where it was posted displayed in the corner of the post itself.

The signal-to-noise ratio would improve significantly if this were the case.

[Patrick Byrne]

Mr Byrne, now you have an odd site. It at first looks like ebay but I can find no "about us" page and on your Wikipedia article it basically says you get your own inventory and sell it trying for low and that's that, making you like one of many discount online shopping sites, although the others are usually specialized. Then on closer digging into your site I find you have auctions with unique people selling. So people can sign up and sell and then they're competing with the main bulk of items of what you're selling and it's possible that there may be a price war and someone on the auction side may win and your site becomes more of an auction site as if the auction side can't keep up then the auctions will be basically hardly any items like it is now, just like on most online auction sites other than ebay.

Your site also has in no way tried to fix ebay's feedback system from what I've seen and I know a lot of ways on how to fix that.

As for naked short-selling, Wikipedia has the most poorly written article on with combining unclarity with generally promoting naked short selling as much as it can. The rest of the internet appears to be against it. It's also takes a lot of reading to understand how exactly it can happen, generally this long thing http://cmkxdiamond.proboards66.com/index.c...92996593&page=2 So, Unrepentent Vandal, I'm not sure how you yourself could be naked short selling. Maybe you meant regular short selling? It appears more like if I bought a bunch of shares of stock using sharebuilder.com and sharebuilder.com just claimed I have the stock and didn't buy any for me then unless the company tanks, sharebuilder.com loses money. Unrepentent Vandal, did you sell someone fake stock or just regular short sell?

Back to Mr. Byrne, now I read that your company has been naked short sold for a very long time, like someone is trying to kill it. But based on the excessive length it looks like someone tried to kill it early by naked short selling, but they failed, and then the fake shares never dematerialized.

Gary Weiss supposedly is against bad stock practices and should know better, but he take the naive idea that naked short selling is good because it can get rid of scam companies instead of causing more problems than it selfs, but then you and WordBomb say he is on a campaign against your company. So who tried to take out Overstock and why and who is still trying to take them out?

Dear Lamont,

As far as Wikipedia goes, yes, those pages are poorly written nonsense because a fellow named Gary Weiss controls them. Gary is protected by Slim Virgin. The rest can be learned about within this site.

I am not going to address the issues about our company here, but the general topic of naked short selling and its effect on American companies can be researched here:

http://www.overstock.com/naked-short-selling.html

Patrick

[Jonny Cache]

Daniel, Greg, Somey, Whoever — Help !!!

All those years of maths and I just never learned to deal with numbers that had $, £, ¥, €, ¤, ad ∞ in front. Could somebody please ∑arise this stuff for phiduciary idiots like me?

TIA¬CREF …

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sun 2nd September 2007, 2:35pm

[Patrick Byrne]

Daniel, Greg, Somey, Whoever — Help !!!

All those years of maths and I just never learned to deal with numbers that had $, £, ¥, €, ¤, ad ∞ in front. Could somebody please ∑arise this stuff for phiduciary idiots like me?

TIA¬CREF …

Jonny

This is a fine 25 minute Bloomberg Special report that explains it clearly and simply. Some with firefox say they have trouble viewing it, but it works on mine.

http://cdn.overstock.com/07-0313Bloom_PhantomShares_NSS.wmv

[Jonny Cache]

Daniel, Greg, Somey, Whoever — Help !!!

All those years of maths and I just never learned to deal with numbers that had $, £, ¥, €, ¤, ad ∞ in front. Could somebody please ∑arise this stuff for phiduciary idiots like me?

TIA¬CREF …

Jonny

This is a fine 25 minute Bloomberg Special report that explains it clearly and simply. Some with firefox say they have trouble viewing it, but it works on mine.

http://cdn.overstock.com/07-0313Bloom_PhantomShares_NSS.wmv

Many Thanks, I'll look at that next time I'm on my other machine …

Jonny

[Unrepentant Vandal]

Daniel, Greg, Somey, Whoever — Help !!!

All those years of maths and I just never learned to deal with numbers that had $, £, ¥, €, ¤, ad ∞ in front. Could somebody please ∑arise this stuff for phiduciary idiots like me?

TIA¬CREF …

Jonny

This is a fine 25 minute Bloomberg Special report that explains it clearly and simply. Some with firefox say they have trouble viewing it, but it works on mine.

http://cdn.overstock.com/07-0313Bloom_PhantomShares_NSS.wmv

With respect, it explains but it doesn't analyse the issue, which makes it rather unhelpful. And the problem is not with others' firefoxes, it is with your webserver reporting an incorrect MIME type, something that is very easy to fix.

[tarantino]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

Yes, I find it disturbing that he doesn't do it a lot more often. If I was running this board, all admins would be using their real names instead of screen names, and every single post, from admins and lesser mortals alike, would have the IP address from where it was posted displayed in the corner of the post itself.

The signal-to-noise ratio would improve significantly if this were the case.

(my bold)

Yes, that's a good idea. Publicly, it should be all the time, or never.